South Korea: Driver Dies After Ramming an Army Gun Invisible in the Dark [NSFL]

A driver in South Korea is dead after rear-ending a self-propelled artillery gun that was crawling down a public highway at around 27 km/h. From behind, in the dark, the thing barely registers as a vehicle at all. A second car piled into the wreck right after, because apparently one slow-moving tank-sized object in your lane isn’t warning enough for two separate drivers.

Images

Video

The dashcam is riding behind traffic on a dark South Korean highway, nothing but a guardrail and lane markers catching the headlights. Up ahead a dim red glow sits in the lane and barely grows for a long stretch, the kind of thing you’d write off as a slow car way up the road and just keep closing on. That’s a military self-propelled gun, rolling along at walking-pace-for-a-car speed with nothing on it that reads as “vehicle” in the dark except one weak taillight, maybe a rear fog lamp, that does basically nothing from this distance. The gap keeps closing the whole clip and the thing never gets any easier to make out until it’s right on top of you, which is exactly how the first car hit it, and the second car hit that wreck seconds later.

It never once looks like what it is until the screen is full of it.

What the Thread Said

Most people couldn’t believe how long the gun stayed invisible, cracking jokes about the army accidentally inventing stealth tech by just not putting proper lights on a multi-ton vehicle. A few noted the tail light actually was lit the whole time, it’s just nobody was looking far enough down a dark, empty-looking road to clock it in time. The other camp put it squarely on the drivers, pointing out the first car had no business going that fast with zero following distance, and the second car just rear-ended whatever was already stopped in the lane, “high beams fix everything” as one commenter put it. There was also some grumbling that a vehicle that size rolling home from training should have had an escort car or a rotating beacon on it, not just a dim little light and a prayer.

South Korea’s Military Convoys Keep Hitting Civilian Cars at Night

The K55A1 in this video rear-ending two cars on a dark road fits a pattern the army has never quite fixed.

• 4,000,000+ won repair bill in 2022 after a self-propelled gun rear-ended a stopped car in Gosung, settled quietly through insurance
• 30+ tanks in a 2010 Paju convoy, one drifted lane and hit 5 civilian cars, no deaths
• 2 soldiers died in 2003 when their K-1 tank swerved around a bus near Pocheon and went through a bridge railing into a river
• 7 soldiers were riding the self-propelled gun in this crash, only minor scrapes among them

Watch Next

TOXIC SAMURAI HOME